Toad
by The Vendetta
Summary: Who is the woman behind Dolores Jane Umbridge's dangerously sweet exterior?
1. Baptised

The Life of Dolores Umbridge

One sun-kissed afternoon in northern Mexico, a woman with a swollen belly knelt beside a river. There was no one in sight. No one for miles and miles, just the glinting sand and her own memories. The sickly humid air reminded her unpleasantly of sweat… just like the kind she'd encountered each day in the dimly lit Squib _Centro de Recurso. _

_Cada dia…_

_**They're just trying to help you**_

_**Let them…**_

She had fought to turn a tea kettle into a spoon. A piece of parchment to a slug. Was that so much to ask for? Could God, if indeed he existed, not make her either a witch or a muggle? Free her from the torture that was living in between the two worlds; unable to perform the simplest spells or understand the workings of a muggle blender? Was that too much to ask for?

The woman had never handled frustration well. Her entire life, she had been measured up and judged by her mother's expectations, but had failed her. Every time.

_**Just take the wand**_

And then there was him. He'd tried to help her. Even loved her… More than she could hope for anyone to love her squat and pug-like body… Her self-doubt… Her insanity.

Why had he, though? What could he have seen in the pudgy woman who had hung around at the Squib Resource Center?

_**Had he been drawn to her by fate?**_

It doesn't matter much now, though, does it?

**_But there is still the child ._This _child. Our child._**

_Mi niña._

The woman looked down at her belly, swollen now to impossible proportions from the vantage point of a highly pregnant woman. Her fingers brushed the grainy surface of a large boulder, trying to support herself.

_**Waves of dizziness**_

She fell against the sand while the baby kicked her, punishing her for everything she had done.

_Fuego_

_Todo ido…_

_**All gone**_

They had deserved it. All of them. Even him. The other women. How many? Their laughter still tore at her ears.

_**It tore**_

_**They laughed**_

And now her only tie to the world was this child, still unborn. The woman brushed her stubby fingers over her stomach once again. It was hard to get used to the feeling. She'd decided long ago to save her child; grant it the gift she'd never had.

_Esperanza_

_**Hope**_

She leaned against the boulder, her vision blurred by the intense sun. She blacked out on the sand as her baby was born.

Hours later, dusk was setting in, and a child was cradled in the arms of her mother. For ages, she studied the thing, placing it on the ground, picking it up again, waiting for love to overwhelm her.

It did not. Curious. The woman had planned to grant it life. But the thing disgusted her; filled her with revulsion. No motherly feeling was lost on this child.

_**Is this how I should feel?**_

She nudged the babe away from her and watched the thing stretch its pudgy, sticky fingers towards the river; reaching for its future… The woman smiled bitterly and laughed, laughed, her eyes glinting cold steel.

_"¿ Quieres el rio?" _She shrieked at it, more than half-crazed by now.

_**Do you want the river?**_

The thing turned from the river and reached for her. Its body was a small image of her own, pudgy and squashed. She shuddered; her eyes latching onto its.

_**You don't want to live like I have**_

She saw death in the child's eyes.

_**It's time.**_

Regretfully, she forced herself to touch the child, slinging its helpless form across her shoulder, close to her, as she waded deeper into the darkening blue water. She closed her eyes, lay back and allowed the water to take her underwater.

Her fingers no longer clutched her daughter, but it didn't matter.

She was free.

Thirty-seven miles upriver, a town was still burning.


	2. Flying Chunks of What?

Disclaimer: Harry Potter is not mine.

Chapter 2: Flying Chunks of What?

Dolores, or Dezi, as Anjelita called her, was an ugly child. She had been forced to accept that truth at an early age; to harden herself against the taunts of merciless children in her village.

Dolores had been scooped from the river _Inez_ seven years ago by Anjelita, a compassionate young widow living alone in her village, _Lazaro._ Anjelita had at first believed the babe to be a bloated fish, floating in the shallows, before realizing that the tiny thing was a child. She had expected it to be dead; after all, a baby couldn't have survived being dumped into the river, no matter how calm it was. But the child had been bursting with life, proving her tiny existence by shrieking and wailing for hours on end. Anjelita gave her the name _Dolores_, or Our Lady of Sorrow.

It was not, as the dumpy, clucking village women called it, _un milagro_. There is a reason why birds fly away during the cold seasons, and there was a reason why Dezi did not drown in _el Lazaro. _Her new child was, without a doubt, a witch, but Anjelita could not allow the superstitious villagers to know this. Their tolerance of the magical realm had grown narrower after the massacre seven years ago. Many of her people's family had died during the mysterious fire in _Mauricio, _a known hotspot for witches and wizards Anjelita's only relation, her dim husband, Andres, had been killed months earlier by a farming equipment malfunction.

"¡_Mi marido desgraciado fue aplastado en la máquina de picar carne!"_ Anjelita had wailed, while still managing to cast an admiring eye upon the remarkably toned physique of the _policia_.

She hadn't _pushed_ Andres into the meat grinder, per se. He had just sort of… stumbled. It had looked a bit like a horror movie stunt gone awry.

At any rate, Anjelita still felt a little depressed when she thought about it, though mainly because the _policia _had been sporting a glinting gold wedding band.

Anjelita had opted to raise Dolores as her own for a simple reason: she was lonely. She was quickly outgrowing her youth (as well as her slimmer clothing), and she secretly suspected the other villagers of viewing her as a spinster. So the woman had cared for Dolores as best as she could, despite her limited experience with magic. Though Dolores was not turning villagers to toadstools right and left, she did have an occasional incident. Gulping crevices appeared in piles of baby food, gurgling and spitting at Anjelita and the delighted Dolores. For the most part, Anjelita's time with Dolores passed peacefully.

xxx

_"Ay, que sapo feo!" _A delicately-featured boy shouted to his friends. "What a fat, ugly toad!"

The other children giggled at this. They had formed a loose circle around the large girl squatting in a muddy plateau by the river.

"What is wrong with you, toad girl? Can't you speak? It is no wonder your _real_ mother tried to drown you. She probably died from disgust when she first saw you!"

"Crawl back into your river where you belong!" A freckled child shrieked. Dolores blinked slowly. She was considered to be deaf and dumb by the village, but Anjelita always defended her. Anjelita knew everything.

"Let's see if we can make her hop like a toad!" An energetic youth yelled to his comrades. He planted his bare feet on the ground, enjoying the _squelch _noise made by the mud and scooping up a handful of filth. The boy examined it in his hand, and then turned to Dolores. "Jump, you ugly toad!"

The mud hit Dolores' face with a wet _plopping_ sound, and slid down her puffy cheek in a painfully slow path, finally falling at her feet. She looked down slowly, as if still unsure that she had been hit. The circle around her grew hushed as the dirty children waited for something to happen

Would she finally say something to them? A couple of the younger children began to fidget as Dolores rose from her squatting position, stretching up to her full height. She flexed the tips of her fingers, feeling the extent of her cold anger and her power.

The youngest child, Maria, shrieked suddenly and began to run away from the plateau, towards the village. All eyes followed her and watched in shock as a hand seemed to rise from the mud and pull her into its depths. When she was no longer visible, a lone bubble rose to the surface of the puddle and popped. A deep silence fell over the children, broken only by the heavy asthmatic breathing of a pimply boy.

"Hem, hem" Dolores cleared her throat and a small smile slid onto her face. This gesture, innocent for any other child, was unnatural and grotesque plastered on Dolores' face. Still smiling, she stepped delicately over the place where Maria had disappeared and continued on towards _Lazaro._

_xxx_

The incident was never spoken of by any of the children. Maria's mother was told by an older boy that she had wandered off in the direction of the river rapids and was not seen again. _Lazaro_ grieved for the child, as was the custom, and her death was not quickly forgotten, tragic accident that it was.

Dolores returned to her life as it had been, though she was no longer teased by the children. Rather, the girl was avoided as if she were the Devil himself. If Dolores was passed in the street by another child, the other would walk quickly in the opposite direction, eyes glued to the ground.

Her lonely lifestyle did not bother Dolores, who viewed it as an improvement over her previous situation. She continued to live serenely, taking pleasure in aiding Anjelita with household chores. In turn, Anjelita assisted Dolores with her education, teaching her to multiply fractions and locate the capital of Nigeria on a map (in case she was ever offered to share a large fortune with a Nigerian tycoon). She knew that Dolores would need to be sent to a wizarding school soon enough, but still, doting Anjelita was not enthusiastic about parting with her adopted child.

xxx

Tragedy struck _Lazaro _again on the eve of Dolores' tenth birthday, causing a ripple throughout the country of _Mexico_ that spread across the globe…


End file.
